MMO's and other PC games are a particular interest of mine. One I spend all too much time doing. Iggep's Blog is where I'll be expressing my thoughts on the various games I play and the industry as a whole.

Friday, June 11, 2010

Very hard to fathom

Anyone reading my blog for a period of time will know that I love to PVP. I PVP daily and on most weekends I spend hours doing it. So perhaps you can understand the frustration with how often I lose random battlegrounds. Some people might say that Horde winning most battlegrounds is a myth, but it's easy to prove one way or the other. Simply open your achievement tracker, then click on the statistics tab, then select the Player vs Player category. You can further filter the results by also selecting the battlegrounds category. Doing all that you can see precisely how many battlegrounds you've won and lost. Overall I've won slightly more thab 50% of my overall battlegrounds -- 50.3% to be exact, but that is only because I've won an abnormally high number of Alterac Valley matches.

I've won 62.3% of my AV matches, 41.9% of my AB matches, 48.4% of my EoTS matches, 46.6% of my SoTA matches, 38.3% of my WSG matches, 55% of my IoC matches. If I were to remove the AV matches as an outlier I'd be experiencing a 47.9% winning percentage and that because I've won 55% of my Isle of Conquest matches.

It's perfectly understandable that in random BG's you're going to have less coordination than you would in pre-mades, and that you are likely to have a wide swath of experience and inexperienced players. It isn't this that constantly frustrates me but rather the unwillingness of most players to listen to clear instruction and understand the strategies involved which each of the battlegrounds. EotS for instance. As it's the weekend for EotS I'd like to be in there right now accomplishing achievements and earning honor but I've lost every single EotS match I've participated in today for no other reason than most of the players have no idea what they are doing, or what they should be doing. Despite clearly telling everyone repeatedly that towers are vastly more important than capturing the flag you see about half the raid always heading immediately for the flag spawn and fighting in the middle. I won't even speak about those who tend to love fighting on the roads.

EoTS is very easy to understand. You want to grab at least three towers and hold those. You earn more points per tick with three towers than the opponent does with one tower and constantly capping the flag. If you can only take and hold two towers then you also want to grab the flag. Opinions vary on what to do with it under those circumstances -- you can either repeatedly cap the flag if you hold the middle or you can hold the flag defensively at one of your towers so the opponent doesn't get it and keep pressure on one of their towers. If you can't hold middle I personally think it's obvious that you'd not want to cap the flag and would want to defend it at one of your towers.

Inexperience is fine. Not being able to use deductive reasoning and observation over time in order to learn from mistakes is not.